Well, the news of the Cicada apocalypse has come true in Saugerties, NY, or at least some parts of it.
My home is an old property, the house itself was built in 1882 and I’m sure a few of the trees around here are at least as old as the house. I, like most people, read of the Cicada invasion and imagined an intense amount of mayhem coming forth, but after a while, not a lot was going on and people were saying the ‘Cicada invasion has been canceled’…. What a bunch of liars.
Over the past 6 weeks these things have been going crazy. To my understanding they only live about 2 weeks, but they come out in waves so the whole thing lasts about 6 weeks. I took some photos and video last week during the peak and it was just crazy. If you walked out to the side yard, right next to a a major highway, the Cicadas were deafening (though I enjoyed the sound) and drowned out all the harley riders who never get noise tickets as well as most of the cars.
If you looked up there were a bunch of them flying around in the air (the air photos don’t do it justice!) and the branches of my trees were just covered in Cicadas along all of the limbs, it was a really amazing site. Brood II is alive and well in my yard and now that they’re slowly dying off and their little corpses being torn apart by the local ants, they’re recycling into the ecosystem with their offspring to come back 17 years from now.
At that I’ll leave you with a bunch of photos, and a couple of videos of these critters, I hope you enjoy them. If you look at the eyes in some of the photos, you can see the pupils of the Cicada, and you can see that they’re looking up at the camera!! I didn’t realize their eyes were articulated. Something you don’t see in a lot of bugs. The photos are in full resolution, so make sure to click them for a full view of these little beasties. The videos are at the bottom!
VIDEOS!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z85xRh_V9Ss[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8HUxrsJHiI[/youtube]
Stay tuned for my next Cicada Brood II post… 17 years from now!
1 responses to Cicadas Brood II in Saugerties, NY 2013
Okay, so it is now 2017 and I just discovered your great website….
Regarding cicadas, in 1990 I lived in north Phoenix, Arizona and we had a cicada invasion in my neighborhood due to the type of trees we had and it was wonderful. There were stories about them on the local news, and they talked about how nourishing they were to eat, so we tried them sauteed three different ways: butter and honey, butter and garlic, and butter and cinnamon. They were delicious, and even my two-year old liked them. Think John the Baptist and you will understand.
Cicadas Brood II in Saugerties, NY 2013
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